I completely agree with you that Frost is hard to categorize. On the surface, it looks like a PWrapper on steroids. Under the surface (pun totally intended), it is Krakatoa’s lost brother.

As you probably know, even Krakatoa was hard to describe, hence the tag line “Volumetric Particle Rendering, Manipulation and Management toolkit”. Krakatoa could do all kinds of post-processing magic to massive particle clouds, but when it came to rendering actual geometry, the user had to load the particle data back into Particle Flow (with all the implications). Frost closes that gap by extending the Krakatoa particle processing pipeline to the world of geometry renderers (pretty much all of them). It is not only disturbingly fast (a customer just showed us 80 million points from two combined LIDAR scans that meshed in slightly over 2 minutes), but also very flexibly because pretty much all parameters can be controlled by channels coming from the particle simulation or a Krakatoa Channels Modifier. So instead of assigning geometry to particles (say, characters) in Particle Flow, you can save a point cloud to a PRT sequence and do all the fine tuning of the render mesh as history-independent post process with the full power of MagmaFlow to drive it. This actually works with the free version of Krakatoa, so using Frost without Krakatoa is a kind of a crime in my book…

As you can see, Frost could be used as advanced scatter tool, as a tool to increase particle counts of low-res fluid simulations (see latest Frost tutorial), as a post-simulation particle geometry assignment tool, and of course it kicks behind for iso-surface generation (it has been used on several large movies by Prime Focus, SuckerPunch being the latest). It has been used to mesh Flood, Realflow and Naiad sims and it is a dream to play with. :o)